AdWords Scripting – PPC Chat Streamcap

This week Sean Evanko (@sevanko) guest hosted with a great question set titled “AdWords Scripting.” The following is the transcribed Streamcap from the live chat:

Q1: How are you using AdWords Scripting?

• I’ve used scripts for reporting and ad delivery changes…very time effective. – Stephen Hall (@SteveOneClick)
• Quality score tracking for a couple small accounts. – Noah Brooks (@noahbrooks)
• I’ve only used them for reporting. Looking forward to learning some more today! – Jesse Semchuck (@jessesem)
• I think they have a lot of potential, but not a lot of people know how to use them or have time to set them up. – Noah Brooks
  • Yea, we have a programmer helping us out, but kind of a steep learning curve if you don’t have access to one. – Gil Hong
• Scripts help us manage multiple clients. We have weekly/monthly reports that email out if certain metrics dip/exceed 20%. – Gil Hong (@ghong_af)
• I’ve used the canned scripts and found them pretty helpful and easy to use for me being a non-coder. – Nefer Lopez (@Nefer_L)
• We have started to use them here through @G5Woody for budget management across mutlitple clients. – David Beltramini (@dbeltramini)

Q2: What results have you seen with the scripts you’ve used?

• We’ve seen more accountability and better prioritization in account management. Especially when you’re handling 30+ accounts. – Gil Hong
• Extremely helpful but limited to non-enterprise accounts. Just don’t have the power to handle huge amounts of data. – Noah Brooks
• It’s been interesting to pay attention to QS changes w/scripts, but the results haven’t exactly been groundbreaking. – Stephen Hall
  • I’ve been tracking the QS as well. I feel the same, interesting but no big surprises. – Sean Evanko
    • Right. the best use/benefit I can see is to have a historical record of QS at any point in time. that helps. – Stephen Hall
• We’ve used this countdown with a few clients and have seen positive results: Google Developers – Counting down to the big sale. – Sean Evanko
• Reminder, don’t forget to name your scripts descriptively, especially when managing multiple accounts. – Stephen Hall
• The automation is what’s really helpful when you have a large client load. – Jason Woodman (@G5Woody)
• Time saving ad pausing/enabling fun! – Elizabeth Marsten (@ebkendo)
• The canned KW Report I’ve found helpful and also QS tracker is awesome. - Nefer Lopez

Q3: How are you learning/sharing scripting info? Any resources you can share?

• Lynda.com has helped out. Not free tho. – Nefer Lopez
• Loving anything @fvallaeys is putting up on SEL. – Elizbeth Marsten
• Since I have weak coding skills I’ve only implemented scripts from the Developer network, i.e. Google Developers. – Stephen Hall
• Been getting up to speed using Mozilla’s resources. – George Gilmer (@GeorgeGilmer)
• Online tutorials. In-house engineers filling in the gaps. freeadwordsscripts.com is a good resource for copy and paste scripts. – Jason Woodman
• Having a goal always helps learning… in my case it was to share scripts on my blog & the occasional forum discussion. – Martin Rottgerding (@bloomarty)
• Mozilla has been the biggest help for me. – Bryan Cisler (@Bryan_Cisler)

Q4: What, if any resources are you dedicating to scripting?

• Only my own time. Authorization limits prevent us from using scripts at scale – can have 10-15 active scripts in all accounts. Also other limits (running time, entities) prevent us from making scripts that are applicable to any account. So a script that works in account A might not work in B because B has too many campaigns/ads/keywords. – Martin Rottgerding
  • You bring up some good points. What other drawbacks/limitations have you seen with the scripts? – Sean Evanko
    • I think Scripts are powerful for certain tasks, but there are few standard applications that you’d want to apply to many accounts. – Martin Rottgerding

Q5: What would you like to see supported in AdWords scripts?

• More stats. For example, you can’t see / use conversion value, lost IS any many other statitics in scripts. And I hope they get the authorization limit extended. 10-15 scripts for all clients in an MCC make scripts hard to use for agencies. – Martin Rottgerding

Resources

• Google AdWords Editor (version as of today’s PPCChat 10.0.1)
• Microsoft adCenter Desktop
• http://www.google.com/ads/answers/
• PPCChat Member List (Twitter)
• adCenter Feature Suggestion
• Bing Keyword Research Tool
• PPC Epiphany
• Free Adwords Scripts
• Google Community – AdWords Scripts

More PPC Chats

Don’t forget to stay tuned for the next #PPCchat on Tuesday at 12 noon Eastern, 9 am Pacific and 5pm in the UK. Same Chat time, same Chat channel.

Participants

Check out the PPC Chat Twitter list to see and connect with all current and prior participants.

No need for Scripting, I do streamcaps faster than they do!

This is a guest post by Paul Kragthorpe; WebRanking SEM Manager in Minneapolis, Minnesota, #PPCChat Streamcap Grabber, SEO Blog Author. Connect with me @PaulKragthorpe, and Google Plus.
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Tags: javascript, jquery, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), ppcchat, scripting, scripts

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 5th, 2013 at 9:21 pm by Paul Kragthorpe and is filed under Pay-Per-Click (PPC), PPC Chat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.